Thread by @Foone, So I was at storage putting away some things and getting some [...]

So I was at storage putting away some things and getting some things when I grabbed someone I had gotten before but never took apart, until now.
Behold, the... Media Player? Maybe the "M" Media player? IT doesn& #39;t seem to have a name...

On the back we& #39;ve got a fan, composite and component outputs. No HDMI, so I& #39;m guessing this is from the early 2000s?

The bottom does have a sticker which gives us a company name: Vivsys.
That domain doesn& #39;t work anymore. This is my surprised face.

So let& #39;s undo all the screws on the back and pull it apart.
It turns out it& #39;s two pieces in a metal tube.
The more boring half is this thing:

You can slide the top off and reveal a hard drive!
Surprisingly big... 750gb IDE. I think that date code is 2007?

Opening up the other side, we reveal the main PCB!

ESS? that is definitely not a name I was expecting.

The other side is pretty empty.
There& #39;s the quick-release IDE connector, fan, jacks, and a few tiny chips hidden back there.

So our main chip here is the ESS ES6425F.

this is an EVERYTHING IN ONE chip for media players.
It can decode MPEG4 & MPEG2, JPEGs, MP3s, AAC, and output NTSC & PAL video, while handling DRAM & IDE connectivity.

This is a Cypress Semiconductor CY7CS8300B. It& #39;s a ... thing. I couldn& #39;t find anything for it.
I& #39;m guessing it& #39;s a separate microcontroller to handle the USB?

This over here is an AMD AM29LV017D. It& #39;s a 2MB flash chip. This is probably the boot code for the OS? it may boot the rest off the hard drive.

There& #39;s some hidden chips behind the IDE connector

This is a TI PS54357. I think that& #39;s a multi-channel step-up/step-down converter? Maybe it& #39;s a 3.3v microcontroller and it needs to convert to 5v to talk to the IDE

More TI chips.
These are bus transceivers, so probably the same thing: converting 3.3v to 5v and vice versa.

So for I/O (besides the screen!) there& #39;s two LEDs, and an IR receiver.
So you apparently controlled this thing entirely from a remote control.

so that& #39;s all I can find out without powering the thing on or imaging the hard drive.

But let& #39;s google vivsys media player... and we get an interesting answer: KARAOKE!

So maybe this was a specialized variant of a karaoke system that was designed for generic video playback?

the wayback machine shows them selling similar products as late as 2017.

the 2007 version of their page fails to load most pictures, but hey, this one looks familiar:

So they sold it both with and without hard drives.
In 2007, the base unit (M-PLAYER-00) was 295$ for no hard drive, up to 650$ for a 750gb version.
They don& #39;t specifically set it up as Karaoke... but it definitely supports it.

Interesting that it acts just as a hard drive if you hook up the USB to a PC... I guess that makes sense. It doesn& #39;t have network access and while you could copy files over using the SD/MMC/CF connectors, having to yank the hard drive out would be annoying.

clearly the next step is to grab my IDE box and see if I can spin up that drive and see if it& #39;s full of copies of "I did it my way"

fun fact: that song is so popular for karaoke and makes people so mad that there have been MULTIPLE DEATHS associated with fights over it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Way_killings">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_W...

The glowing benchPC is booting

It spins! And we& #39;ve got files.

So the ASIA55/ASIA552/Paris88/DVD movies folders are full of VOBs like they& #39;re ripped DVDs. TVKOK 2 is a bunch of VOB files for songs, and they& #39;re mostly Vietnamese.
Same for 04.Music.

music has a bunch of directories for different musicians, including a "US Music" one which contains the following songs.

here& #39;s part of an example file from the TVKOK vobs

there& #39;s a surprising number of english songs in there, given that about 80% of them are in vietnamese.
Also, I& #39;d bet money given the quality and clear NTSC interlacing on these videos that these were ripped from laserdisc

TVKOK is also the main group of files on this drive. 617 gigabytes of VOBs, on a drive with 699 gigabytes of space.

Also all the date-modifieds on this drive are from 2007.
So this probably was set up with karaoke and never changed until it got dumped in a thrift store

the one subfolder under "dvd movies" is "live die"

James Bond, maybe?